Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

Gloria Cronin (Brigham Young University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 2000

Places

Canada (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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Ravelstein

(2000) is a memorial to the late Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago in which Bellow, posing as a Boswell, is writing a Johnsonian tribute to his late friend. Just as Bellow memorialized Isaac Rosenfeld and Delmore Schwartz in earlier fictions, he now memorializes Allan Bloom in this latest work.

At the age of 64 and for several years thereafter Bellow found in Allan Bloom the adoring and approving older father figure and Jewish soul mate he had never had. But Ravelstein also becomes a site upon which the narrator Chick/Bellow can imagine himself more fully, particularly as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Ravelstein is full of jokes, one-liners, and Catskill comedian gags which capture a distinctly first-generation Jewish American voice, wit, neuroses, manners,

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482 words

Citation: Cronin, Gloria. "Ravelstein". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 October 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=13838, accessed 25 April 2024.]

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